Getting from AUR

Manual installation

Download the platform you want to develop on. This site provides online links to several Android SDK components.

Extract the tarball to /<path_to_android-sdk>/platforms.

Now, you should see the platform of your choice installed in the Installed Packages window of the Android SDK and device manager.

Setting up Development Environment

When using Eclipse as an IDE you need to install the ADT plugin and related packages. If you get a message about unresolvable dependencies, install Java manually and try again. Alternatively you can use Netbeans for development after installing living and usually up to date plugin according to these instructions.

Setting up Eclipse

Most stuff required for Android development in Eclipse is already packaged in AUR:

Then go to Available Plugins and install the Android and Android Test Runner plugins for your IDE version. Once you have installed go to:

if you have problem with netbeans 7.2 "org.netbeans.modules.gsf.testrunner was needed and not found." Please remove the the Android and Android Test Runner , then change the url of nbandroid to: http://nbandroid.org/release72/updates/updates.xml , update the sources and you just need to install the Android only.

Tools -> Options -> Miscellaneous -> Android

and select the path where the SDK is installed. That's it, now you can create a new Android project and start developing using Netbeans.

Connecting to a real device - Android Debug Bridge (ADB)

To get ADB to connect to a real device or phone under Arch, you must install the udev rules to connect the device to the proper /dev/ entries.

Using existing rules

Install the AUR package android-udevAUR to get a common list of vendor IDs. If ADB recognizes your device (it is visible and accessible in IDE), you are done. Otherwise see instructions below.

Figure Out Your Device Ids

Each Android device has a USB vendor/product ID. An example for HTC Evo is:

vendor id: 0bb4
product id: 0c8d

Plug in your device and execute:

$ lsusb

It should come up something like this:

Bus 002 Device 006: ID 0bb4:0c8d High Tech Computer Corp.

Adding udev Rules

Use the rules from Android developer or you can use the following template for your udev rules, just replace [VENDOR ID] and [PRODUCT ID] with yours. Copy these rules into /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules:

Note: reloading udev rules under systemd should not be required, as any rule changes should be picked up automatically.

Configuring adb

Instead of using udev rules you may create/edit ~/.android/adb_usb.ini which contains list of vendor ids.

$ cat ~/.android/adb_usb.ini
0x27e8

Does It Work?

After you have setup the udev rules, unplug your device and replug it.

After running:

$ adb devices

you should see something like:

List of devices attached
HT07VHL00676 device

If you do not have the adb program (usually available in /opt/android-sdk/platform-tools/), it means you have not installed the platform tools.

If you are getting an empty list (your device isn't there), it may be because you have not enabled USB debugging on your device. You can do that by going to Settings => Applications => Development and enabling USB debugging. On Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) the Development menu is hidden; to enable it go to Settings => About phone and tap Build number 7 times.

Tip: Make sure that your user is added to the group:

# gpasswd -a username adbusers

If there are still problems such as adb displaying "???????? no permissions" under devices, try restarting the adb server as root.

If you run lunch without arguments, it will ask what build you want to create. Use -j with a number between the number of cores and 2 * number of cores.

The build takes a lot of time.

Tip: Make sure you have enough RAM

Android will use the /tmp directory heavily. By default, the size of this partition is half the size of you RAM. If it fills up, the build will fail. 4GB of RAM or more is recommended.

When finished, run the final image.

$ emulator

Tips & Tricks

During Debugging "Source not found"

Most probably the debugger wants to step into the Java code. As the source code of Android does not come with the Android SDK, this leads to an error. The best solution is to use step filters to not jump into the Java source code. Step filters are not activated by default. To activate them:

Linux distribution on the sdcard

You can install Debian like in this thread. Excellent guide to installing Arch in chroot (in parallel with Android) can be found on archlinuxarm.org forum.

Android SDK on Arch 64

When using the Android SDK and the Eclipse plugin on a 64 bit system, and the 'emulator' always crashes with a segfault, do the following:
Provide a localtime file in /usr/share/zoneinfo/localtime e.g.:

# cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /usr/share/zoneinfo/localtime

Better MTPFS Support

If you have an Android device that doesn't support UMS and you find mtpfs to be extremely slow you can install jmtpfsAUR from the AUR.